Zellis

Project overview

Zellis are an award-winning payroll and HR solutions platform, delivering great experiences for employees. Whilst at The BIO Agency, we helped them to redefine their brand strategy and creative identity positioning within their industry.

Workshop session

To kick off the project, we invited various employee's of Zellis to join our discovery workshop which gave us insight into their perspectives and interpretations of what the brand stands for. From the feedback and insights we received, we discovered three conceptual brand routes.

These routes were themed and had different directions in terms of purpose and meaning.

Creative discovery

After gaining insights from the workshop, I explored these three routes which we named as. Performance, Openness and Joy.

At this phase of the project, we experimented with different ideas that tied in the core meaning of each route. Each route had specific themes and traits in order to test against users, with a clear distinction between them.

We presented the three defined routes to Zellis, explaining how we were going to bring them to life, in home page form for user testing purposes. We did this so users can contextually digest the different theme directions.

User testing

The audience for testing purposes were professionals within the industry, who either had lots experience with similar platforms or little experience. Also, people who were in various roles, including other non-related industries.

This helped us get an unbiased perception of the brand and well rounded views on each route. We asked people to achieve specific navigational tasks and how the overall design made them feel, what they thought about the brand, etc.

The refined creative direction

After compiling user feedback and analysing information from those sessions, we identified which areas were performing well and which were pain points, or just didn't communicate or land well with the user how we might of expected.

We agreed with Zellis that specific creative elements were to be merged into a final route, from which further evolution would happen. We then started to look at how we could craft a design system around the finalised route and visualise deliverables.

Creating a design system

We then built out a foundational design system from the defined creative. This would evolve over time as the brand grows and become the source of truth with all creative output and implementation.

We educated and guided Zellis through this piece of work, helping them understand what a design system is and why it's vital as a business to have these solid foundations in place. As you can see, we got in-depth into systematic elements and the intention of an atomic design approach.

We mocked up how their dashboard platform might look using the design system and creative direction. The different colour pairings communicate different products or services that Zellis offer.

Brand guidelines

And finally, whilst we were crafting out the design system, we defined the start of a brand guideline that tied everything into one place, visually showcasing the final creative route into a usable point of reference.